Making a decision -- is this an indicator of consciousness?

don't you guys have a WS thread to post on?

Um, what just happened here?

ppl decided to be dicks for no particular reason

the ilx hivemind started weeping

phil d. and ledge's pictures aren't showing up for me, what are they

i was just admiring mordy's argument destroying slam-dunk of monstrous proportions

I'm never going to disapprove of pictures of Thom Yorke's tits in any setting, at all ever, but, um. Poor Grandpoint Genie.

i think maybe u misunderstood the conversation? no one, including me, is writing slam-dunk arguments of monstrous proportions. i don't have any stake in any of these arguments except the extent to which i think they're interesting and worth thinking about. i certainly don't have any slam-dunk proof that God exists above nature, within nature, or at all. xp

issue kinda came up in this thread too: T|S One Box or Two Boxes (Newcomb's Paradox)

I was wanting to ask Mordy about his interpretation of negative dialectics, but I'm somewhat afraid we'll just get image bombed into oblivion.

go ahead, i'll quit being a dick. and commenting on this thread at all prob.

"either you always do what knew you were gonna do, which isn't free will then"

i don't think this is even true on a human level -- lots of people know that they want to be a doctor or a lobbyist well before they go down the path to become one.

anyways free will seems more easily grasped on a legal liability level than on a philosophical one.

That's not knowing, that's making a decision and then following through on it.

xp I guess I mean here that the nonidentical (das Nichtidentische) between reason + reality, or subject/object, or whatever is non-accessible. we can only have access to false identifications, which is sorta where i link it to apophatism: that we can only know God through the ways in which we don't know Him. adorno actually talks a little about free will explicitly in ND too...

To deny free will outright means to reduce men unreservedly to the normal merchandise form of their labor in full-fledged capitalsim. Equally wrong is aprioristic determinism, the doctrone of free will which in the middle of the merchandise society would abstract from that society. The individual himself forms a moment of the merchandise society; the pure spontaneity that is attributed to him is the spontaneity which society expropriates. All that the subject needs to do to be lost is to pose an inescapable alternative: the will is free, or is it unfree.

Each drastic thesis is false. In their inmost core, the theses of determinism and of freedom coincide. Both proclaim identity. The reduction to pure spontaneity applies to the empirical subjects the very same law which as an expanded causal category becomes determinism. Perhaps, free men would be freed from the will also; surely it is only in a free society that the individuals would be free...

so it's a false dichotomy for him.

"The antinomy between the determination of the individual and the social responsibility that contradicts this determination is not due to a misuse of concepts. It is a reality, the moral indication that the universal and the particular are unreconciled."

Then he says some crazy stuff about Hitler.

The whole thing is worth reading imho

making a decision and following through is "knowing" as far as we have capacity to know anything/do anything.
for example, if a CEO buys up shares of his company because he's planning to release an awesome product and he's going to follow through on that plan, I think that would be a good case for insider trading, based on insider knowledge.

Oh, I've read ND, I was just interested in how you connected your two thoughts. Still not entirely sure how you're linking it to apophatism, mind.

And yeah, so it sounds like Adorno is a compatibilist. About right, really.

xpost it's not omniscience, though, is it. Which is the problem with the God paradox that was being discussed...

if you're omniscient, that just makes the case of insider trading even stronger! the idea that free will is contingent on imperfections in knowledge isn't consistent with the way we hold entities responsible for things.

well, both boil down to examples of knowing things through negative knowledge. does that make more sense? xp

Philip, you would be culpable for the intent, yes. But the point is that with knowledge so perfect as to be foresight, then you are trapped - if you do the action, then you are following something that is predestined, if you don't, then you don't have perfect knowledge. (NB: I'm not necessarily saying that the paradox is pointing us in the right direction, I just don't think your rebuttal is sound enough.)

Mordy, yes, that makes sense in that way, but I think ultimately they're saying different things. Might have to go and re-read it, though, my argument isn't cohering in my brain enough on this front.

i wondered on watching a dog climb a wall to walk on without being prompted by its owner to what extent an animal had free will or not. Seemed to have more awareness of its surroundings than I'd have assumed at the time.
For a dog at least, might have expected it of a cat.

Could really do with one of those right now, have noticed that plastic muesli bags are getting holes in them, So am thinking there may be other types of mammal in this place.

if you're omniscient, knowledge is will is power. all three things tend to converge the more you have of any. there's no paradox, at least if you want to put God on trial for negligence/breach of contract.

so that's how God got so omniwealthy. by doing all that omninsider trading

it worked for bill murray in groundhog's day

classic philosophical example on decision-making is probably Buridan's ass - if an ass is hungry and there are two equidistant bales of hay, what reason is there for it not getting caught in decisional equilibrium and just starving instead of choosing? Counterargument is that donkeys don't tend to die while standing between two bales of hay, counterargument to that is that there would always be factors which mean that this simple empirical situation is never really a state of precisely equal choices - Spinoza is p funny on this in that he just str8 up says ya, if an ass (or a human, equally lacking in free will as we are) were put in this situation then indeed, it would just die, but maybe the better and more adequate way to think of it in human terms is where we end up going crazy or killing ourselves because of whatever impossible bind of equally valid decisions we've found ourselves in.